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Bomber Kills 36 Outside Afghan Recruiting Center

KABUL, Afghanistan — A Taliban suicide bomber posing as an army recruit blew himself up in the midst of a crowd outside an Afghan military recruiting center on Monday in the northern city of Kunduz, killing 36 people, including five children, the authorities there said.

The suicide bombing, the fourth in Kunduz Province since February, reaffirmed the area as a major focus of Taliban activity in recent months.

The child victims were mainly shoeshine boys who were working the crowd waiting outside the center, according to the police, witnesses and hospital officials.

Taliban spokesmen have said they had shifted their attention to areas like Kunduz in response to the surge of new American military forces concentrated mainly in southern Afghanistan. While places like Kandahar in the south have been unusually quiet over the winter, there has been comparatively little respite in Kunduz and other places to the north.

According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, an independent agency that monitors incidents in the nine-year-old war, there was an average of one attack a day in Kunduz Province in the last two weeks of February.

Kunduz is under the control of the German Army, which, although part of the NATO force in Afghanistan, is subject to what are called national caveats — in this case they limit its authority to carry out offensive military operations.

Photo

An Afghan policeman drops a victim’s shoe into a pile of victims’ belongings after a suicide bomb attack in Kunduz on Monday.Credit
Wahdat Afghan/Reuters

In Monday’s attack, the bomber killed 36 people and wounded 40 in all, according to Dr. Humayoun Khamosh at the Kunduz Public Health Department.

An Afghan reporter for The New York Times who reached the scene said he saw children as well as men in army uniforms among the victims. “Most of the dead children are shoe polishers working in the area,” he said. “You could see their shoe polish boxes and brushes still there.”

President Hamid Karzai called the suicide bombing a “vile attack” that nonetheless would only encourage more recruits to join the fight against the Taliban. “It will by contrast embolden their resolve and dedication to eliminate a cruel enemy that wants nothing but bloodletting,” he said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, took responsibility for the attack and said the bomber was a Kunduz resident, whom he identified by his single Afghan name, Saifullah.

“I strongly deny the allegation of civilian casualties in the attack,” Mr. Mujahid said. “Some known, pro-puppet-government circles claim that civilians and children who were playing in an adjacent park are among the dead, but in fact the park is almost a hundred meters away from the blast site.”

He conceded, however, that shoeshine boys were among the victims. “While we are really sorry for any innocent civilians’ losing their lives in our action, we strongly advise civilians not to approach Afghan and foreign military convoys, bases and individuals.”

The shoeshine boys, Mr. Mujahid added, “were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In late January, the Kunduz Province police chief, Abdul Rahman Saidkhaili, boasted that Kunduz was, in his words, “100 percent cleared of Taliban.” Ten days later, a suicide bomber killed the governor of Chardara district in the province, jumping on him in his office on Feb. 10.

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Taliban activity has shifted from Afghanistan’s south to the north.Credit
The New York Times

Then, on Feb. 21, another bomber entered the district government offices in Imam Sahib district, killing 34 people, many of them militiamen waiting to get national ID cards. And on March 10, a suicide bomber jumped on the police chief himself, killing him and three of his companions.

Many of the Taliban’s targets have been so-called Arbakai, or village self-defense forces, and pro-government militiamen, whose role has been controversial in Kunduz and other areas.

While Kunduz is a majority Pashtun area, many of the government officials and police officers are ethnic Tajiks, associated with the former Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban for many years.

In many of the recent attacks, the bombers have managed to penetrate heavy security around their targets. “There may well be some people inside the police headquarters who are spying and providing information to the insurgents,” said Fatima Aziz, a member of Parliament from Kunduz. “Otherwise, how is this possible?”

A prominent Taliban commander in Kunduz, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could evade capture by the authorities, said that in many places in Kunduz, as a result of government pressure, the group had withdrawn its fighters from combat. Their response has been to shift to a reliance on suicide attackers.

“Our tactics have changed, and now instead of doing grouped and organized attacks, we prefer the suicide attacks, and here we have many youths who are willing to do martyrdom attacks,” the commander said. “In the coming new year we will prove our physical existence in Kunduz.” He was referring to the new Afghan year, which begins in March.

The latest attack overwhelmed the small hospital in Kunduz. Critically wounded victims lay in hallways, bodies were stacked in the courtyard for family members to identify, and wounded men and children screamed in pain as doctors rushed to attend them.

In a separate occurrence, also in northern Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents in the Charbulak district of Balkh Province besieged a police checkpoint early on Monday, exchanging fire with officers for several hours. A carload of police officers coming to the checkpoint’s aid hit a roadside bomb, killing three of them, according to Gen. Abdur Rauf Taj, the deputy police chief in Balkh.

Sangar Rahimi and Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Kunduz.

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Taliban Suicide Bomber Kills 36 Outside Military Recruiting Center in Afghanistan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe